On the Edge of Intervention: Europe and the Civil War

In this thoughtful, deeply researched study of the diplomatic history of the Civil War, Howard Jones provides a fresh reconsideration of some time-honored questions about foreign intervention in the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy. His exploration of policymakers’ anguished decision-making and incomplete understanding of events on the other side of the Atlantic makes for compelling reading and provides the most thorough account to date of Civil War foreign policy at its highest levels.

The abiding theme of Blue and Gray Diplomacy is the contingency of events. Recognition of the Confederacy by a European power—and with it European intervention in the war—was a likely possibility from the creation of the breakaway republic in February 1861 to the summer of 1863. At that point, French Emperor Napoleon III abandoned his scheme to recognize the Richmond government in order to expand French influence in the Americas. Jones’ findings join a wave of scholarship in the past decade that denies the inevitability of either the Civil War or Union victory.

The book concentrates on the heads of state and foreign ministers of the Union, the Confederacy, Britain, and France. Also receiving attention are Russia, Mexico, and Spain. In this respect, Blue and Gray Diplomacy is an unabashed traditional diplomatic history of “statecraft at the highest levels” (p. 3) that devotes considerable attention to the individual talents of the various power players.

Jones praises U.S. President Abraham Lincoln as an “innate and consummate diplomat,” despite his lack of experience in foreign affairs prior to 1861. Lincoln’s judgment, restraint, and focus on the connections between diplomacy with Europe and war in America helped him reign in his volatile Secretary of State, William H. Seward, his rival for the Republican presidential nomination and a noted Anglophobe. Jones credits Seward with using his hotheaded reputation to support his extravagant threats to fight any power that recognized the Confederacy. Seward’s goal, Jones argues, was not war with Britain but deterrence against intervention.

Unlike the Union, Confederate leaders in Richmond desperately wanted European involvement in the war. Recognition would open access to credit, likely provide naval power to break the Union blockade, and possibly bring European armies into the land war. Leadership hampered Confederate aims, however. In line with most assessments of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Jones says “beneath his admirable exterior ran an innate, cold aloofness that soon manifested in a stubborn, self-righteous attitude rarely tolerant of either criticism or advice” (p. 15). Davis exacerbated his personal limitations by sending ideologues in place of seasoned diplomats to European capitals. James Murray Mason, Confederate emissary to Britain, “was anything but a diplomat, both by training and temperament” (p. 84). James Slidell, minister to France, comes off better, but he had no more success than Mason in winning recognition.

Confederate diplomacy also suffered from its guiding assumption that European demand for Southern cotton made intervention inevitable. On its face, king cotton diplomacy had a plausible economic rationale. The South supplied Britain and France with 70 to 90 percent of the cotton used in their massive textile industries. Over a million factory hands in Britain and 200,000 in France relied on those imports, as did the factory owners, merchants, and financiers who reaped outsized profits from turning raw cotton into finished cloth (p. 77). Working against these economic incentives were the excess supply of cotton that industrialists had stockpiled during recent bumper harvests, as well as British and French resentment of Confederate presumption in dictating terms to them. The fact that Southern cotton was produced by slave labor, a practice rejected by European masses and elites alike, made such crass economic threats especially galling.

Ignoring these problems, Davis and his emissaries pinned their hopes on cotton’s leverage in European capitals. When the de facto embargo of Southern exports failed to move Britain and France, Confederates had little to fall back on...